Afterlife

by Merrie Destefano

  He became my nemesis, this dark creature of the night. I learned later that his name was Neville Saturno and he was addicted to genetic engineering. It was his Achilles heel, the bit in his donkey mouth that some other unknown monster used to move him across the chessboard of my life.

  It was too dark, so I couldn’t see him the night my father was killed. But I could smell him. That sugar-sweet smell of rotting flesh filled my senses and blinded me with fear. I know Chaz thought I was brave because I cursed our attackers and cried for help.

  But I was only trying to save myself. I didn’t care about Dad or Chaz. I was trying to run away when my father collapsed, when one of his arms got tangled around my feet.

  I couldn’t break free.

  I panicked in the suffocating black night. I screamed and kicked and cursed until my voice faded to a whisper, until I was the only person left in my collapsing universe.

  And sometimes I feel like I’m still trying to break free.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Russell:

  That lizard monster, that human-esque creature that stalks my nightmares, came back years later, just like I knew he would. It was the last week in May, about four years ago, and I was just leaving our West Coast headquarters—the very first Fresh Start laboratory—when I decided to go for a walk. I needed to clear my head. Lately every meeting with our top-level executives spawned something dark. Things had gotten increasingly complicated in the past several years, ever since that Stringer rejected his new body and accidentally downloaded into someone else’s clone. Problem was, it was already occupied. Two Newbies in one body. And we didn’t figure it out for five months. By that time both Newbies had gone insane. The media crucified us when they got hold of the story, and all the major governments were demanding to see our records, to make sure that it didn’t happen again.

  Nobody cared about the poor clowns that got fried in the process. They just wanted to make sure that it never happened to them.

  So, I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going and I should have kept one of the company guards with me. Hindsight is all about wishing that you could change the past. I don’t care about that. I wish I could change the future, that I could rewrite the bloodstain splatter on the wall that I know is coming.

  Neville found me in Costa Mesa, on the corner of Harbor and Adams. It was even more horrific to see him on a sun-drenched street than in the darkened caverns of my memory. His muscles were carved from a fresh trip to a gen lab, his breath as sour as the pit of hell, and his smile was exactly the same as the night he threatened my father.

  “I gots something for ya, puppy.” The lizard monster stood in my path, beefy reptilian arms crossed. I could see liquid movement beneath his skin as sinew and bone refolded, regenerated. A snappy tension hung in the air, seemed to surround him like a crackling halo, a vortex that could pull me in if I got too close. He tossed me a translucent plastic chip about the size of my fingernail. Some sort of computer file. “It’s a project ya needs to finish for me.”

  “What makes you think I would help you?”

  “I hears yur mama, she ain’t feeling too good.”

  I shrugged. “So?”

  “Ya thinks it’s an accident, yur mama beings so sick?”

  I paused, trying to figure out the connection between the chip in my hand and the mysterious illness that had recently incapacitated my mother. I didn’t notice his hand sweeping toward me. Don’t think I could have moved fast enough anyway.

  He grabbed me and yanked me into a nearby alley, into blue-black shadows, where he shoved me down on the ground and held me with a knee to my chest. I gasped, tried to fight back, to break free, but it was over before I knew it.

  “I hads a feelin’ ya would needs some convincin’,” Neville breathed in my ear.

  Then he jammed a two-inch gen-spike in my left forearm. I shuddered and gasped again, sharp pain shredding down my arm, then throughout my body. A second later I got the adrenaline kick and I shrugged Lizard Boy off me like he was a piece of paper. He flew across the alley and landed with a dull thud, his back against a distant brick wall, legs splayed out beneath him, and a wicked grin on his primitive face.

  The genetic cocktail rushed through me, bringing waves of delirious ecstasy. Like some sort of superhero, I could feel the muscles in my arms and chest expand like bands of steel. I could have wrapped that monster’s legs around his head, and I moved toward him, ready to crush his skull with my fist.

  But he simply held his hand in front of me, palm up.

  He had my mother in his hand: a tiny VR projection, a three-dimensional, real-time recording. She was talking to a doctor dressed in something like a space suit.

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t know what’s wrong with you, Mrs. Domingue. We’ve never encountered these symptoms before,” the miniature faceless doctor said. “We’re going to have to quarantine you, for your own safety—”

  Mom sat on an examining table, silent.

  “Of course, that is, until we can figure out how to treat your illness.”

  “I can’t go home.” It was a statement, a resignation.

  The doctor shook his head.

  My mother lowered her face into her hands and began to weep. It was quiet and heartbreaking, a devastating scene that she never would have wanted me to see.

  “You’re a demon,” I said. I wanted to kill this creature sprawled on the ground in front of me.

  “Yeah, and yur gonna helps me. Or yur mama, she dies.”

  Nemesis is too small a word for what this beast was or what our relationship would become.

  I staggered backward then, as the second wave of the genetic cocktail hit me. It was better than euphoric. It was heavenly. Suddenly I didn’t care about our corporate image or my dying mother. I was caught in the middle of an inconceivable high, muscles growing, endorphins roaring, and I was already wondering how I could get my next fix.

  Then I understood.

  This reptilian beast had me exactly where he wanted.

  The little plastic disk explained it all. The secret government experiments. The doctors and scientists with the yard-long credentials who would be oh-so-happy to work with me. The current state of the research process.

  They were close, but not close enough. They needed access to my grandfather’s research, the original resurrection formula—before it was altered for clone bodies. They needed my laboratory and my equipment.

  They needed me.

  I sat in front of my computer, deciding which of their experts would be best to work with, scrolling through curricula vitae that read like scientific encyclopedias. At the same time I clutched a handful of gen-spikes—my precious thirty pieces of silver, for which I was ready to betray my family, to destroy everything they had worked so hard to preserve.

  I took hours to select the members of my team. When I got down to the final person, I debated for a long time, torn between four different applicants. I toggled back and forth from one list of credentials to another. At last I opened their photos. That was when I made my choice.

  She had long glossy black hair, green eyes, olive skin—she was gorgeous. Her credentials weren’t quite as impressive as the other three, but if I was going to sell my soul to the devil, then I may as well enjoy the trip to hell.

  Ellen Witherspoon. That was her name.

  And I was right. It was an incredibly wonderful journey to hell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Russell:

  Sunlight poured through the lab windows, casting stark black-and-white patterns on the far wall. Cages. Bars. The long soundproof room was lined with crates, like tiny jail cells. In the beginning the animals barked whenever we entered the room, eager for attention. Now they whimpered, withdrew into shadowy corners and tried to look invisible. Ellen and I worked a late shift, after the rest of the crew had gone home. I could tell the stress of the project was beginning to get to her.

  Of course, she didn’t have a shoebox full of gen-spikes
to help her forget what we were doing. So I guess I could understand the circles under her eyes. The hollow way her cheekbones stood out, like she didn’t eat, or maybe couldn’t.

  She knelt beside one of the open cages, running her fingers through the fur of a golden retriever. It was dead.

  “Can you tell me again why we agreed to experiment on dogs?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “It was in the research done by Smith and Clarksburg—”

  She stood up. “You don’t mean Clarkson? Immanuel Clarkson?”

  “I guess.”

  “That Nazi? I can’t believe we’re using his notes—”

  “He wasn’t a Nazi, he was just—well, I guess he was just about as bad.”

  Ellen shook her head. “Tell me about the research.” She paced the long room, glancing in on the dogs that she passed.

  “The government started it, years ago—”

  “The U.S. government?”

  “Yeah, about fifteen years ago somebody discovered that dogs could recognize their owners, even after resurrection.”

  “I thought that was an old wives’ tale.”

  “Apparently some old wives’ tales are true. So the government started running experiments, behind our backs of course. Nobody at Fresh Start knew what they were doing. After resurrection, one of their operatives would go to a neutral location, someplace they had never been in their previous life. Somebody else would bring their dog, the dog that had belonged to them before, see, and kind of ‘accidentally’ let the dog off the leash. About seventy-five percent of the time, the dog would run to its previous owner. Even though the dog and the resurrected person had never met. I guess certain dogs tested higher. German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, poodles, golden retrievers. So those were the breeds that Clarksburg—I mean Clarkson—decided to work with.”

  Ellen was kneeling beside a cage at the end of the room, petting one of the dogs through the bars. I think it was the black German shepherd. Omega. I kept telling her not to name them, that it made it harder to do the experiments if you got too close to the animals, but it was almost impossible to say no to her.

  She had a way of getting whatever she wanted.

  I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling awkward. Sometimes she made me wish that I had never met my wife, that maybe Ellen and I could have had a chance at something more permanent—although I never knew for sure if she felt the same way.

  “We need to record the data,” I reminded her.

  She nodded, and lifted the tag that hung on the shepherd’s cage. “Omega,” she said while I wrote down the information. “Life Fifteen: last death sequence on August third. Formula T3-a.” She moved to the next cage, where a Doberman cowered, unable to look her in the eyes. “Theta. Life Seven: last death sequence—” Ellen paused. When she spoke again, her voice was heavy with emotion. “—yesterday. That would be August fourth. Formula T3-b.” She walked to the next cage, to the open door where the dead golden retriever lay. “Epsilon. Life Ten: last death sequence this morning. August fifth at one A.M. Formula T6-a.”

  “Still no signs of life?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the longest period so far between death and resurrection?” I asked as I flipped through the log.

  She stared off into space. “That would be Tau. The time between her last death and resurrection was three hours. After that she only lived for about twenty minutes, and then she was gone for good.”

  “Three hours.” I was trying to be objective, to avoid thinking about the golden retriever, the smiling dog that my little girl would have loved. “So Epsilon has been dead for almost nine hours…Do you think there’s any chance—”

  “No.” Ellen shook her head. “But I’d still like to give her a little more time. Just in case.”

  I nodded. Like I said, I would do almost anything for Ellen.

  It was an ever-twisting road, this quest for immortality. It was a journey with no clear beginning or end. I felt like a pawn, a dead marionette hanging on tangled strings, and I could feel my conscience bleeding out with every injection I squeezed into a patch of coarse dog fur, with every gen-spike I slammed into my own muscle-weary flesh. I had to hide the stench of my addiction. The heavy fragrance of flesh decaying from within, the atrophy of muscles stretched past their natural limit followed me everywhere I went. I started wearing loose clothing so no one would notice the bodybuilder physique that came and went on a regular basis. I took four showers a day. I began to avoid intimacy with my wife, so she wouldn’t see the obvious evidence of genetic restructuring, and at the same time I opened my bed willingly to Ellen.

  I think a part of me wanted to get caught. I wanted an end to the horror.

  I just never expected the ending to come the way it did.

  Like a crash of lightning. Immediate and irreversible. Like the death of my father.

  With blood on my hands. Again.

  She dropped by in the middle of the night once. I thought I was alone. This section of the lab was off-limits to the general staff. Not even Chaz was allowed back here.

  They were all dying. Our experiments were failing. We lost three dogs in the middle of the night. One more that morning. Only one was left—the German shepherd, and he was pretending to be asleep. But I knew he was watching me.

  He was always watching me. I was always the one who killed him.

  I’d reached a limit, I guess, some line that I drew in the sand and dared myself to cross. I didn’t know what to do. We were one step away from losing everything, from failing.

  And if I failed, they would kill my mother.

  I got ready to euthanize the last dog, prepared the injection, set it on the counter and then stared at it. After a long quiet moment, I picked up the syringe, rolled it between my fingers. It would be so simple to just slide the needle into my own skin, let the drug flow through my veins until my heart stopped. The pain would disappear, all of this would just fade away. I pulled up my sleeve, stretched out my arm. At that moment, images of my mother, sick and dying, flooded my mind. Without realizing it, I began to weep. The syringe slipped from my fingers, I crumpled to the floor and buried my head in my hands.

  I think Ellen must have been standing in the door, watching.

  She picked up the syringe, tossed it in the wastebasket, and then knelt beside me.

  She started to cry and I thought that she understood. It seemed like we were one person that night, one mind, one soul. But I was wrong.

  She had no idea what was truly in my heart. No one did. Not even me.

  I couldn’t sleep. For two days I lived in a twilight world of caffeine and tequila, my thoughts rising and falling through the depths of a murky, wave-tossed sea. I had moments when I thought we would somehow make it. That our last dog would survive and we would finally conquer immortality. We would succeed where the gods had failed.

  And then I would sink—stony weights fastened about my wrists and ankles—plummeting through blue-and-green despair. The dog would die. It would stay dead. My mother would die.

  But I knew it wouldn’t end there. My mother was only today’s pawn. Tomorrow they would burrow their talons into someone I loved even more. They hadn’t whispered their plans yet, but I could feel them, could see them written in a black scrawl across stormy clouds.

  Isabelle. My daughter. My reason for living.

  She would wear the stain of my failure like a butcher’s apron.

  As much as I feared for her life, I knew that there were things they could do to her that would be much worse than death. At times, the vile imagination of man far exceeds any demon dream, any scene in hell with scorching flames.

  Images of the Underground Circus danced like the lake of fire in my mind.

  I downed another glass of tequila—the real stuff, not the synthetic crap. And then another. When I caught my breath, I slammed a gen-spike into my arm, sucked in the swirling moonlight, black and gold, cloud and shadow, filled my lungs with the sour and the sweet. Closed my eyes. Said
a prayer, something I rarely did anymore.

  Then I went to the lab. To check on my last hope. Omega. I wanted to bury my head in his fur, to believe in the loyalty that flashed in his dark eyes.

  I wanted to believe in something again. Anything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Russell:

  I thought I saw black shadows running toward the bayou, running through the shifting rain. There were only a few lights on inside the plant, an early shift that started at 5 A.M. Puddles glittered and shivered in the half-light of early dawn, while rivulets of dark water forged a brave course, daring to band together to form tiny streams that thickened, broad cold veins that pushed toward freedom. I darted through the grumbling storm, reached the side doors and punched in my code.

  A second later I breezed across the threshold, wet, a chill spreading over my shoulders.

  My vision blurred, focused, blurred again. I stumbled through shadows toward the lab, legs and arms stiff from my genetic cocktail. I got lost once, turned down an empty, darkened corridor and tripped over a rolling cart that someone had left out.

  A lifeless clone stared up at me. Eyes open, mouth parted.

  It lay on the cart, draped in a white linen sheet, waiting—for life, for someone to claim it and make it real, to fill it with emotion and thought and purpose.

  As if any of us really has purpose.

  I shrugged it off, shook my head, felt the cold seeping through my clothes. I shouldn’t be here, I thought, as I stumbled away. I should have stayed at home and let the dark night pass. I should have curled at the foot of my daughter’s bed, glad that she was still safe.

  But here I was, blundering my way through an echoing darkness, ignoring the occasional employee that darted across my path.

  I was at the door to the lab now. Maybe I should just go home. Wait until my head clears. Let my flesh take one more step toward complete decomposition. Then I saw something. Light flooding out from beneath the door.